not a 100% word by word - i wrote it down by listening, but i like that dialogue between Brad and Joseph Lubin (Ethereum ConsenSys)
@ about 24 min mark
Brad: "the XRP Ledger is more decentralized than mining-based solutions (because of the nature of PoW)..."
Joseph Lubin (Ethereum): "... talking about decentralized... but you do sell XRP regulary right...?"
Brad: "... we're transparent about it... how much do you sell?"
Joseph Lubin: "Ehm..."
Brad: "...transparency and maturity in this market are critical...”
Joseph: "sure"
Brad: "there are many other ecosystems not being transparent...no one knows what happens in those ecosystems..."
Joseph: "...but they are decentralized about the ownership of the token..."
Brad: " ...if its a mining-based protocol, then centralization is based upon mining control, not ownership..."
Joseph: ehm one small aspect of the governance of the ecosystem could be considered centralized if you talk about the mining aspect... sure"
silence
Moderator to Joseph: "Joe it's been said that you are one of the biggest ethereum holders... how do you manage treasury in consensys..."
Joseph: "(laughs) ehm... i guess no comment..." ..."we manage our treasury like a company would manage it`s treasury..."
Brad (jumps in): "...i find it interesting that ripple gets attacked for being transparent... actually the next xrp market report will come out sometime later in this week... but, because we share that information we get attacked for it while other platforms don't share that information and so they are insulated from the same critiques... i think in the dictionary it's called hypocrisy... i'm not 100% sure, but it's close"
Joseph: "...ehm we are a private company..."
Brad (jumps in again): "Ripple is a private company too"

Blog URL: https://xrpcommunity.blog/one-person-can-make-a-difference/
One person can make a difference in the cryptomarket & that person could be you! Find out more in today's blog.
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https://xrpcommunity.blog/xrp-vs-gpi/
In this blog
• I write about the disadvantages of SWIFT and Correspondent Banking.
• I talk about the XRP advantages and compare it with SWIFT gpi.
• I explain how Corda Settler works and what SWIFT's partnership with R3 really means.
I hope you enjoy it.

Blog URL: https://xrpcommunity.blog/we-must-lead-crypto-out-of-the-dark-ages/
The cryptomarket must leave environmentally-destructive tech behind to grasp its future; this and all the latest market news about XRP in today's blog!
𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐨 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬: Will the government shutdown delay the introduction of the Token Taxonomy Act in the U.S.? One source says Valentines Day might hold the answer.
𝐑𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬: Brad Garlinghouse participates in a memorable panel discussion at the Davos World Economic Forum; Tsinghua University Institute for Fintech Research is added to the list of UBRI participants; and Ripple publishes the 2018 Quarter 4 XRP Markets Report;
𝐂𝐨𝐢𝐥 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬: Sabine Bertram from Coil creates an application that rewards survey participants with XRP.
𝐗𝐑𝐏 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬: R3 establishes the Corda Network for governance functions, and lands a major win with ING; BTCExa announces a new pairing for XRP; and Freewallet indicates its plans to offer XRP support.
I hope you enjoy the read: Please feel free to share my blog with a friend or share it on any other platform - and thanks for doing so!
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... and that means the Known Amendments page has been updated. rippled 1.2.0 will introduce (at least) 3 new amendments, which (if enabled following 2 weeks of support from 80+% of validators) introduce transaction processing changes. In this case, the changes are pretty small:
fixTakerDryOfferRemoval fixes a bug where dry offers sometimes weren't properly removed when autobridging. Thanks to GitHub user demonstefan for contributing the code that eventually became this amendment!
fix1578 makes fill-or-kill offers return a new tecKILLED code (as requested on this very forum) when they're killed. It also makes TrustSet transactions fail when they can't set the NoRipple flag, instead of "succeeding" without changing the flag. Both of these changes are meant to make the transaction engine just a little less tricksy.
MultiSignReserve reduces the reserve requirement for signer lists so they occupy less XRP for just sitting there.
Stay tuned for more information about the upcoming release and the features in it!

TLDR? There are lots of announcements about banking/FI partnerships but very few about channel partners for Ripple. Is that where they head next?
Having read through the Jed/IBM thread started me thinking about where Ripple goes next in its business cycle. Ok, blame the quiet market action for me getting a bit distracted. The comment that triggered these thoughts is the following from @King34Maine:
Having competed with IBM over the last 20 years (reasonably successfully I should add!), I don't recall them making too many bad calls when it comes to strategy so the Stellar colaby seems initially strange. IBM are a solid brand, hugely competitive and have a stronghold on the banking sector that goes back to mainframe and tape days and never really let up. They have serious political and lobbying muscle as well. My point is not to suggest a pairing with IBM but what channel partners Ripple will need to be a successful software and DLT vendor. Channels is where it's at.
Back to IBM: IBM's big money is in areas that don't get much attention - it sure as hell isn't PCs or FMCG. They'll be there once DLT solutions become mainstream and they'll be making serious bucks along the way with zero press. They'll be re-packaging or reselling third party solutions as will the other systems integrators, outsourcers and the like that I've worked with over the years.
Unlike most of the lightweights in the cryptomarket, companies like IBM back their solutions with contractual guarantees, SLAs and indemnities and don't have any knotty problems with regulators. If you're a large bank, that risk allocation on tech solutions is essential and something that crypto and DLT companies can't offer.
Just to give one example of how critical this issue is, the question of risk allocation for tech solutions can take anything from 6-18 months to negotiate and resolve (depending on the size of the deal) and requires massive amounts of pre-sales effort. Banks invest a LOT of time and money to get this right and this is the case even for banking systems that aren't system critical (c.f. trading desk, retail banking systems, online banking that come with much more exposure for the bank and even fiercer debates about risk allocation).
For those systems transferring billions of dollars such as Ripple's DLT, I'd expect the bank would expect the supplier to put even more skin in the game. The thing that struck me today is that Ripple does direct sales which restricts how much risk they can absorb. And the direct sale model spreads the sales effort very thin. Dilip Rao and Brad are amazing, flying here, there and everywhere but we need 1000 of them. Channel partners give you access to that sales juggernaut.
Which brings me to the key point. Part of me wonders about whether the strategic next steps for Ripple will be to focus less on actual banking clients and more on identifying IT channel partners who have scale and assets (to provide the type of "got you by the balls" assurance ol' school bankies love), engineering muscle and political clout in the banking space. So not R3 or Temenos but perhaps an organisation such as NTT? Not Amazon or Tencent or Alibaba but perhaps a HP, CSC or Accenture? There aren't many announcements about this type of thing (i.e. channel partners) so I'm curious if anyone has seen anything in that space that I've missed?
Anyone think channel partners aren't critical at this point, or at all?

Blog URL: https://xrpcommunity.blog/crypto-superbowl-consensus-versus-proof-of-work/
It's a Superbowl-themed blog! Read about the match-up between Bitcoin and XRP, along with all the news impacting XRP.
𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐨 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬: The unexpected death of QuadrigaCX's founder results in exchange liquidity problems; The UK's FCA issues enforcement guidelines; and the Bank for International Settlements issues a paper detailing profound security risks with proof-of-work networks, specifically analyzing Bitcoin.
𝐑𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬: The CEO of SWIFT and Ripple debate onstage at the Paris Fintech Forum; SWIFT announces a new proof-of-concept allowing R3 to initiate SWIFT GPI transactions; Ripple hires a new General Counsel; Saudi British Bank (SABB) is discovered to be a RippleNet member; a new Ripple Drop episode is released by Ripple; and the Xpring Initiative publicizes a new development position for Interledger
𝐗𝐑𝐏 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬: New XRP code amendments are announced; Three exchanges add XRP trading; Coingate, a crypto payment processor, adds XRP as a checkout option; CredEarn indicates that their largest asset class for deposits is XRP; A new swag shop offers a new physical XRP coin for collectors; and a new video game plans to use the XRP Ledger for their online economy.
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Hey all - I wanted to follow up to report that we've just released our new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. We've incorporated quite a few changes, many of which were specifically intended to address issues raised in this thread and I'd be interested to hear your feedback.
We've gone through the entire set of policies and clarified sections that were confusing before. We didn't intend to collect any data that isn't directly necessary for providing the service and neither did our external legal counsel who drafted the original policy. But due to a combination of legal jargon and poor wording, it sounded like we wanted to collect and even share information that in reality we have no interest in whatsoever. Keep in mind that to us, any data we collect from you is a pure liability - we don't make any money from it, we have to spend money to protect it from hackers, and if it makes someone think twice about signing up, we lose out on that revenue. The bottom line is that we spend a lot of time finding ways to collect less, not more. You may have seen our new passive Web Monetization meta tag - by switching from JavaScript to a meta-tag, we avoid calls to our server to fetch the JavaScript which would cause us to have more data to worry about. You can expect us to make more changes in that direction in the future as we improve the technology.
Other changes in the policy are related to compliance (IRS form 1099, requirements from credit card processor) but once again, we'd much rather not collect anything because it just creates additional work and risk. So we did our best to describe as precisely as possible what we need to collect in order to comply with all applicable laws and regulations.
We've also clarified what constitutes abuse of our platform. Most of these restrictions are driven by either legal restrictions (e.g. gambling) or risk-based restrictions (e.g. adult content) that our payment processor or the credit card network mandates. I would point out that Web Monetization is fundamentally open technology, so if you want to use it for (legal and ethical) purposes outside of our Terms of Service, you're free to bypass Coil and use the open-source implementation, Minute. We intend Coil as a platform to make Web Monetization available to a wider audience beyond crypto and lot of that audience uses credit cards today.
Once again, I'm very interested to hear your feedback and we're committed to continuing to improve our policies in the future. It has been absolutely amazing to work with the XRP community and all the help that we've received during our closed beta so far.

Very interesting discussion. It is very positive that they agreed to share the stage and even joke about negotiating and co-operation.
SWIFT were making some good points (to paraphrase)
Banks find the migration costs to Ripple/XRP expensive and want to avoid paying them
SWIFT's messaging system is much much faster now they have set up GPI and payments can be tracked better
Banks worry about crypto volatility
SWIFT's system uses API's but not blockchain which they thinks is still some way out from adoption
Banks will survive if they adapt, and they are adapting
Crypto has this reputation of being unregulated and dangerous to use because of the criminality
Everything is already digital
Cost of transactions on SWIFT are already very cheap (2 -3 cents)
BG had good counter points
Ripple provide a two way messaging system (in my view a killer point, it radically changes the sorts of services you can provide)
Speed of transaction makes volality near zero and less than fiat to fiat volatility
Ripple is going down the regulated route which actually makes tracking and protecting transactions more secure not less secure
SWIFT's talk of an open system is disingenuous because it is their controlled API system owned by SWIFT
Blockchain is already here.
The video ends prematurely.
My impression was that these two companies agree that the world has changed and the future is that both companies will be working together on open platforms on the IoV. SWIFT has the advantage of moving banks cheaply onto a more up to date API only system but Ripple has the advantage of more advanced futuristic technology.
If you are a new business you would go with Ripple, if you are an established business you have to make some hard assessments whether to move everything across to block chain now or to do it in stages.

https://beachhead.com/component/content/article/9-uncategorised/80-white-paper?Itemid=437
Beachhead is going to use the XRP Ledger to help run their online economy in their upcoming VR game Beachhead 2020.

I don't know what you want other people to say. If you feel like all the Ripple partnerships are somehow "scams", then surely you want nothing to do with XRP (if that's what you want someone to say)....just sell and rid this scamcoin from your portfolio.

Ripple, a provider of leading enterprise blockchain solutions for global payments, today announced Stuart Alderoty has joined the company as General Counsel, reporting to Chief Executive Officer Brad Garlinghouse. In this role, he oversees all legal services and manages the company’s global legal, policy and Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) compliance teams.....
https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/stuart-alderoty-joins-ripple-as-general-counsel-2019-01-30?siteid=nbkh

Case Study Italian banks pioneer the use of Corda Enterprise for interbank reconciliation—opening the way to a full production roll-out
https://www.r3.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Spunta-Final-copy.pdf

this doesnt mean XRP's price wont go up until five years. although it does mean many people in here wont be invested in XRP anymore because they lost patience, got bored, and sold.
once XRP is at $5, we'll hear the same exact complaints when it drops to $4.50
"Whats happening!??????"
"I just bought at $5 and now im in the red!?"
"Once this thing drops to $3 its all over"

The stuff SBI are putting out about how SBI, R3 and Ripple work together in practice is huge : - I learnt a lot from this article which was posted on another thread by Jabit (my transcription of the first half of the text)
In Japan we started to use an application for transferring money, called Moneytap. This application uses only DLT but I would like to make it XRP caperble. Once we are able to use XRP on “Corda” a R3 blockchain technology which SBI has been investing in, the financial transaction of trading can be done in a very short time. Because Corda has a function called smart contract (including easy verification of contract, implementation, execution, computer protocol for negotiation. The characteristics of this function is a to process the guaranteed trusted transaction without being intermediated by a third party). We can use it not only for international money transfers but also for all kinds of trades such as transaction of bonds and/or derivatives in the financial field. From our end, we would like to finish this feature of XRP like Corda.
In order to do this, we would like to create a joint venture with R3 and SBI in Japan like we did with Ripple. And start up the consortium as soon as possible and develop the system while holding the conferences in which many people can learn the system to use in parallel. In this way, by using XRP, visitors from all over the world coming to Japan can pay bills without exchanging the money from US dollars to Japanese Yen. It is a new challenge for us. Next I want to talk about “S coin platform” which we have started. We issued local currencies “NISEKOPay” at Niseko in Hokaido and “US-Dalba Coin” at Odalba in Tokyo. Our goal is to incorporate XRP into this S coin platform and expand to the world level. To pursue this, we are considering using Corda of R3 as a foundation of this system.
As soon as we set up the joint venture business, we will focus on expanding this system all over the world. It is perhaps my dream as well. To achieve this , we would like to progress step-by-step. R3 is characterised as possessing blockchain technology which can apply to a wide range of the field not just the financial world. On the other hand, Ripple has a strong feature on transferring money. Therefore, we can take advantage by using each characteristic by tasks. Use Ripple for international money transfer, and the rest of the transactions will be performed using Corda R3. A huge advantage is the function of Smart Contract. Our current strategy to expand worldwide is to complete the system before Osaka EXPO 2025. If we succeed, it will be revolutionary development. Likewise I believe that blockchain will be incorporated into all kinds of industries. It will get real as I always say that “work finance as a core and reach beyond finance” Therefore, SBI will not be solely a financial company but will be beyond.

We don't have figures for dollar value XRP purchases by institutions prior to Q4 2016, however, we can probably assume its fairly negligible to the whole picture (if you multiply the below 2016 figures x4 for instance it doesn't make a lot of difference). Relying on the figures we certainly have, we can see the following has been invested by banks/FI in XRP year over year:
2016: $4.6m
2017: $67.4m
2018: $171.7m
Doesn't look too bad. That's $243.7m financial institutions the world over have invested in XRP specifically. A quarter billion dollars? I don't think there is any other crypto currency that can make even remotely a claim such as that. Interesting too, to look back and see this as a percentage of (coinmarketcap's) current "market cap" for XRP:
2016: 0.04%
2017: 0.55%
2018: 1.85%
Banks/FI's have been buying up more and more of what's out there, and we know they have stringent sales restrictions when they buy. Assuming no subsequent sales, and conversely, assuming no on-market buys, almost 2% of all XRP supply, or 1 out of every 50 in the wild, may be currently owned by a bank or financial institution. That's kinda cool.
Looking quarterly:
2016 Q4: 4.6m
2017 Q1: 6.7m
2017 Q2: 21m
2017 Q3: 19.6m
2017 Q4: 20.1m
2018 Q1: 16.6m
2018 Q2: 16.9m
2018 Q3: 98.0m
2018 Q4: 40.2m
What I find interesting about this is what I perceive as possibly 6 months latency on banks/FI's en masse reacting to the bull run of 2017 EOY. Sales were down for the first two quarters of 2018, and only picked up (significantly) in Q3. Another way to look at it is we can't necessarily draw too much useful information from what the market's doing versus institutional sales - they may not have much in common, or if they do, there may be significant and unknown delays involved, undermining usefulness.
Another way to look at the last quarter is that its the second highest quarter XRP's had in terms of institutional sales, and almost twice the size of third place. To me its too early to draw a conclusion regarding the drop in Q4. It could be an ordinary fluctuation - eg, if we had 5 years worth of figures would we always see a drop in Q4? (Even something as simple as holidays?)
But on the whole, I think the report was pretty low-standard. Not in terms of numbers, but in terms of style and content. I looked forward to Miguel Vias' lucid market insights into the crypto space, his play-by-play recaps of pivotal moments from the quarter, and the many charts - some of which would have taken some effort to prepare. This Q4 2018 report is much lighter, low on content, and doesn't even bear his name. It's a shame, but perhaps it indicates he's been busy doing more important things, which I guess could be a positive.

More and more European banks in the last 6 months have adopted the instant transfer in euro especially since a few weeks
Natixis (BPCE), General Society, BNP etc ...
Between 10 to 20 seconds, 24/24, 365/365 with a fee of a few cents per transaction. But what does it really mean?
These names may not tell you anything, yet they are ubiquitous in the European banking sector and in the world
If we take again the list of the 20 biggest banks in the world and that one speculates the use of the XRP through the platform R3 corda where does one arrive? A picture is worth 1000 words.
That's why I think the CEO of SBI is also bullish about using the XRP: "But according to SBI CEO, Yoshitaka Kitao, 2019 will be 20 of the major bank of the world, start incorporating XRP."

As noted in the screenshot of the article, it has passed the House. However, it has not passed the Senate. Both chambers have to approve it so it has not yet been approved by Congress. It has been referred to committee: "Senate - 01/29/2019 Received in the Senate and Read twice and referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs." In the US, less than 5% of bills end up becoming law.
This can be due to a number of factors such as heavy lobbying by industries in opposition, disagreement among committee members, or irreconcilable differences between the House and Senate. A good example of the latter is the GOP's attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare). The bill the House passed could not be passed by the Senate so it never became law.
The interesting thing about H.R. 56 is it is sponsored by two Democrats and two Republicans from four different states: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/56/cosponsors. One of the cosponsors is Mark Meadows who is one of the founders of the "Freedom Caucus." This is arguably the furthermost right group of lawmakers in the House and they are notoriously difficult to work with. The fact that their leader is a supporter of this bill along with a couple of Democrats gives me hope that it might just be bipartisan enough to become law.

Unless I'm reading this wrong or misinterpreting...they are saying they saved over 13k on the transfer fee. So was this a multimillion dollar xRapid transfer? I thought they said they'd be gradually adding zeros to the transaction fee size as time went by?
Am I reading this wrong?!